Please read below then Summarize Bandura\'s moral disengagement theory and expla

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Please read below then Summarize Bandura's moral disengagement theory and explain how it may help explain individual and crowd violence. Can we prevent moral disengagement? If yes, how?

Bandura's moral disengagement theory

How people do bad things: turning off moral controls

STANFORD -- How could Congress vote against curbing automatic weapons on the

same day a gunman uses one to commit a massacre in Texas? How could Ivan Boesky

advocate greed to business school graduates? How did Watergate conspirators become

lawbreakers?

The answer, according to Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura, lies in the

ability of people to selectively activate and disengage their internal moral controls.

"The different mechanisms of moral disengagement help to explain how otherwise

considerate people can perform reprehensible acts," he said.

Psychologists have studied extensively how people develop morality. Now they are also

examining how they selectively turn off their moral controls.

The findings, Bandura said, indicate that "conducive social conditions rather than

monstrous people" are required to produce heinous deeds.

If the public better understood how moral disengagement works, Bandura said, "they

would not be naively looking for who holds the smoking gun. Nowadays, most people

who commit reprehensible acts are too sophisticated to leave a trail of smoke. They

intentionally diffuse or displace responsibility in ways that escape blame."

There are "four major points in the self-regulatory process at which internal moral control

can be disengaged from detrimental conduct," Bandura writes in the 1991 Handbook of

Moral Behavior and Development. Self sanctions can be turned off by:

Reconstruing conduct.

Before committing an act they would normally find repugnant, some people work toward

portraying the act as serving a moral purpose.

Boesky developed a moral justification for greed on Wall Street. Members of Congress

justify voting against a curb on automatic weapons by appeal to the constitution and the

right to self protection. "They ignore widespread killing with guns in our society and the

public outcry against automatic weapons," Bandura said.

People also use euphemistic language to gain social acceptance for reprehensible

conduct. Watergate participants did not talk of themselves as criminal conspirators but

rather as "team players" carrying out a "game plan," Bandura said. Political candidates

often use "the agentless passive" voice to make human actions seem as if they were the

work of nameless forces, or they use outlandish comparisons and "colorful metaphors

that change the nature of culpable activities."

Displacing or diffusing responsibility.

This can be the "protectability" designed for the president and others in the chain of

command of the Iran-Contra Affair or the everyone- does-it defense offered by many

white-collar criminals when they are caught breaking a law.

Intermediaries in a nasty chain of actions free themselves of responsibility more easily

than can the person who gave the order or who pulls the trigger, Bandura said. The more

removed people are from the consequences of their actions or the more a task is

fractionated, the easier it is to overcome a person's reluctance to harm other humans.

Disregarding or misrepresenting injurious consequences.

The tobacco and gun industries have long used this technique, denying their products

harm others, Bandura said.

Dehumanizing or blaming the victim.

Some senators displayed this tendency in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings,

Bandura said. They argued that, even if Thomas had acted improperly, Hill must have

done something to bring it on herself. Imputing blame "operates as a prominent

disengagement mechanism in sexually assaultive behavior towards women," Bandura

said.

kpo/morals

Explanation / Answer

Albert Bandura’s moral theory of disengagement

Albert bandura’s theory states that just like people have the ability to feel for others by empathy and development of morality, they have the ability to partially stop thinking morally about people and the same people who are considerate can perform acts which may seem gruesome. It is not necessary that a person has to be from a socially or economically low background, even the respectable and the most kind people can commit such acts. This can be changed by changing the perspectives of people. When people learn to take more responsibilities, when people learn to not justify their actions, when people end the reconstruing conduct, when they stop misinterpretations of their actions and when they stop blaming the victim for actually being a victim. That is when we can stop moral disengagement from occurring.

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